{"id":5374,"date":"2020-04-10T06:34:31","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T13:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/?p=5374"},"modified":"2020-05-30T11:20:21","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T18:20:21","slug":"post-liberal-theology-no-post-liberal-lutheranism-yes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/?p=5374","title":{"rendered":"Post-liberal theology, no; post-liberal Lutheranism, yes!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Please click here for a pdf version of this document<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who is that \u201cshadowy, if not menacing, figure on the contemporary scene, perhaps not yet clearly defined, often a puzzle to both friend and foe, usually mistaken simply for a hard-line conservative confessionalist or orthodoxist\u201d[1]<\/a>?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why, it\u2019s Gerhard Forde \u2013 a post-liberal Lutheran!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gerhard Forde defined the term, adding a cautionary note:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo mistake a post-liberal Lutheran for a hard-line conservative confessionalist or orthodoxist \u2026 is seriously to misread the situation.<\/strong> A post-liberal Lutheran is one who has been through the options spawned since the Reformation and realizes that they have all been used up. <\/strong>Least of all does infallibilism or reactionary conservatism of any sort provide an answer.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Enlightenment had challenged old certainties, and the churches had to react. Forde: \u201cIn broad terms, the reaction was of two sorts: resistance or accommodation.\u201d[3]<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inerrancy and Infallibility <\/strong>(resistance).\u201cFor both Catholics and Protestants the resistance took the form of a defensive hardening of lines against the Enlightenment \u2018erosion\u2019 of the biblical and apostolic faith.\u201d[4]<\/a> Catholics who resisted<\/strong> appealed to an infallible pope<\/strong>, while Protestants appealed to an inerrant Bible<\/strong> as ultimate authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liberal theology <\/strong>(accommodation). <\/strong>Those who found the new forces of critical thinking and historical study convincing or inescapable attempted to accommodate<\/strong>. Note that the word \u201cliberal\u201d here does not refer to political liberalism. Rather, the liberal movement that dominated much of the twentieth century was characterized by an openness to science, biblical criticism, and an emphasis on experience. Liberal\u201d here means \u201cto liberate,\u201d as Forde clarifies:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAmong Protestants it was called Liberalism. Broadly speaking we shall take \u2018liberalism<\/strong>\u2019 in this essay to mean attempts to \u2018liberate\u2019 from ecclesiastical or biblical authoritarianism<\/strong> by grounding faith elsewhere in \u2018natural,\u2019 human religious experience.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forde notes that the move to accommodate faltered, but there was no going back to inerrancy:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe surrender of biblical inerrancy to various versions of \u201ctruth as encounter\u201d and other existentialist<\/strong> ploys seemed to lack the bite of the older views of biblical authority. Perhaps it was that something of the offense was gone. Yet there was no way back. Older views of biblical inerrancy<\/strong> were not an offense, they were just intellectually offensive<\/strong>.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Post-liberal Theology. <\/strong>What to do then? Post-liberal theologians saw the faith was being eroded by the experiential-expressive approach of the liberal method. They sought to defend the integrity of faith communities by focusing on how the creeds and practices of these communities shape life <\/p>\n\n\n\n

and give it meaning. They claimed that Christianity should be viewed as a narrative, an overarching story, with its own grammar, culture, and practices. This post-liberal movement is represented most notably by a Lutheran, George A. Lindbeck (1923-2018).[7]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"This<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The son of Swedish-American Lutheran missionaries, raised in China and Korea, Lindbeck was attuned to the yin and yang of the Chinese mindset. He grew up with an appreciation for other cultures, religions, and Christian denominations. He taught at Yale Divinity School from 1951 until his retirement in 1993. As a young scholar he had been a \u201cdelegate observer\u201d to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and was subsequently appointed to the US Lutheran-Catholic dialogue (1965-1983) and the Joint Commission between the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation (1968-1987). His post-liberal theology grew out of his involvement in ecumenism, as he points out: \u201cIt was the ecumenical movement even more than my teaching at Yale \u2026 that has been the context of my thinking.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his 1984 book, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age,[9]<\/strong><\/a><\/em> Lindbeck drew on linguistic philosophy and cultural anthropology to establish a sociological or \u201ccultural-linguistic\u201d understanding of religion.[10]<\/a> He proposed that Christian denominations be understood as \u201cinterpretive communities,\u201d each with its own distinctives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lindbeck\u2019s post-liberal approach aimed to protect the integrity of each tradition, but his anti-foundationalism meant there could not be basic differences because everything is relative. Because everything is relative, the only way to determine truth is by unity. Unity then becomes the problem and the solution. Unity then defines truth. Lindbeck\u2019s post-liberal theology fueled the modern ecumenical drive for unity, but it faltered because it did not allow for basic differences and ultimate truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early years of the US Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, Lindbeck functioned as the de facto<\/em> quarterback for the Lutheran team. But his post-liberal theology failed to win support from both the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics on the dialogue. Ecumenical claims of having achieved fundamental consensus failed to convince.[11]<\/a> Rather, the Roman Catholics as well as the Lutherans on the dialogue increasingly looked to Gerhard Forde to articulate the Lutheran stance in the post-modern world. Lindbeck eventually resigned from this dialogue in 1983.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Post-liberal Lutheranism. <\/strong>Gerhard O. Forde (1927-2005), born and raisedin Minnesota, was the son of a pastor. He attended Luther College and earned his PhD from Harvard. He taught church history\/systematic theology at Luther Seminary from 1964-1998. Forde served on the US Lutheran-Catholic dialogue from 1972 until 1992 and was President of the International Luther Congress from 1985 to 1993, an indication of the esteem in which he was held by Luther scholars worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Lindbeck, Forde was a post-liberal theologian, that is, he was \u201cone who has been through the options spawned since the Reformation and realizes that they have all been used up.\u201d[12]<\/a> Yet he was not persuaded by the approach of post-liberal theology as advanced by Lindbeck and others. As Forde wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf the kind of interpretation suggested by Lindbeck is right, there would seem basically to be two possibilities. The first and most obvious is to turn back to Rome.<\/strong> If we [Lutherans] are a confessing movement in the church catholic, and if, in Tillichian terms, we have pushed our protestant principle to the degree of losing our catholic substance, then the only real way to find our substance again is to go back to Rome, that preeminent custodian of such catholic substance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe other possibility would be the old Protestant move: back to the Bible<\/strong>, to move, perhaps, in the direction of so-called evangelical or fundamentalist Protestantism, lately dubbed fundagelicalism. If we are denominational Lutherans, basically critical of or anti-Rome, and yet fear the loss of substance, we would likely be attracted by the so-called evangelical or maybe even neo-pentecostal movements in contemporary Protestantism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDisenchanted Lutherans today are attracted by both possibilities. Witness the talk of \u2018evangelical catholicism\u2019 on the one hand\u2014sometimes to the point of schism\u2014and the actual Fundagelical splinter group, the AALC, on the other. When free-choice pietism has lost its moorings in the external Word, the only way to get it back in line is by turning to authority structures with the clout to do it. One can find that either in Roman-type hierarchicalism or in biblicism. <\/strong>In either case, satis est non satis est. <\/em>The gospel and the sacraments are not enough. They never are when they don\u2019t bring the eschatological end and new beginning. An authority structure above and beyond the gospel must be added\u2014<\/strong>akind of substitute eschatology to assuage our impatience!\u201d [13]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forde saw the post-modern dilemma yet took a different path: \u201cI found the answers to my questions not in nineteenth- and twentieth century attempts to transcend or remodel the tradition but rather in<\/strong> a probing of its own depths<\/strong>.\u201d[14]<\/a> And: \u201cWhat attracts the post-liberal in Luther and the Reformation is precisely the most radical dimensions of the message that give promise of new possibilities beyond used-up options.<\/strong>\u201d[15]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The starting point<\/strong> for post-liberal Lutheranism:<\/p>\n\n\n\n